Marchart, Oliver. “The absence at the heart of presence: radical democracy and the ‘ontology of lack”. Tonder, Lars. Lasse Thomassen. Radical Democracy: Politics between abundance and lack. Manchester UP. 2005.
Tada: Ontology was originally the study of being-qua-being starting with Aristotle. Then with Descartes and culminating in the work of Berkeley and Kant and heirs it turned increasingly to epistemology shifting from being-qua-being to questions of being-qua-understanding. Thus starting to look for the ‘grounds and conditions of of understanding and bypassing all the stuff about the nature of being. Then comes Heidegger but prepped by Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche, there is a return to ontology.
However, ontology did not re-emerge in full glory, as a return to the pre-critical ‘pre-modern’ stable ground of being. By the time of its return, the ccategory of being had turned into something intrinsically precarious, something haunted by the spectre of its own absent ground. For this reason, today’s ontology must not be understood in terms of, to use Derrida’s words, traditional onto-theology, in which the role of being was to provide us with a stable ground, rather it must be conceived of as hauntology, where being is always out-of-joint, never fully present (18).
Heidegger work points out … He pointed out that metaphysical thought
- whenever the traditional difference between the general (that is, ONTOLOGICAL) realm of being-qua-being and the particular (that is, ONTIC) realm of beings was established
- has always taken this ontological difference for granted and never inquired into the difference as différance.
- Hence being in the most radical Heideggerian sense does not reside on the ontological level, nor does it reside on the ontic plane.
Rather it is the play which simultaneously unites AND separates the ONTIC and the ONTOLOGICAL, thus introducing an irresolvable difference into being that amounts to a constitutive deferral of every stable ground of being — a move later taken up by Derrida with his concept of différance …